Apollo Bay and Costerfield - Do We Have Two Different EPAs?

“The EPA will investigate whether any offences had occurred under the Environment Protection Act.”

Thus concludes an article in the 13 January, 2015 edition of the Herald Sun regarding asbestos contamination of soil in Apollo Bay.

According to its chief executive, Mr Nial Finegan, “EPA, on a precautionary basis, quickly ensured the soil was contained and then conducted testing”.

It is most welcome to see EPA applying the precautionary principle that underlies its charter somewhere, at least. Soil containing fragments of asbestos from a carpark construction site had been used to fill in sections of the foreshore at the popular resort town, potentially endangering the health and well-being of locals and visiting tourists.

The residents of Costerfield would like to know when, exactly, EPA will begin the same application of precautionary measures in their town. For Costerfield does not face "potential" contamination; the contamination has been confirmed. 

In early 2014 water tanks, soils, livestock and the residents themselves were served doses of antimony and arsenic (and other toxic metals and chemicals), possibly from the unmonitored vents and crusher at Canadian mining company Mandalay Resources’ gold-antimony mine. (edit 4/9/15: Probably from the mine's evaporative misters, too.)

(In Thailand, they close the mine for a month when that happens, to assess the health impacts on the community. In Costerfield, the authorities put the mining facilitator, DSDBI, in charge of a 'rapid health assessment', pretend that there's a roof on the ore crusher and let the dust-generating works continue.)

Figures are yet to be released by EPA, DSDBI or the mining company regarding the actual amounts of particulate and other emissions from the mine for the 2013-14 period, but it is confirmed on the Commonwealth Government’s National Pollutant Inventory website that 7,300 kilograms of PM10 particulate emissions were released – unmonitored – into the Costerfield air during the 2012-13 financial year. This represents 0.84 kilograms of particles each and every hour of each and every day over that time. 

(edit: Here they are at last. The mine claims that the particulates are limited to diesel fumes, now. But look at that oxides of nitrogen figure... a tonne a week...

and you'll note the following:

Cover erected over primary crusher in 2014 to minimise dust emission. 

It wasn't there to begin with and was only erected after residents concerns were raised, not after any initial testing or monitoring. No one monitored anything of importance in Costerfield for nearly a decade!

Note, too that this is a "cover", not a roof. There is no roof on the crusher and dust is emitted, though the departments said there wasn't. Never has been. Despite the lies that have been told to the media. )

Were EPA there ensuring - “on a precautionary basis”, of course - that these particulates posed no threat to the well-being of Costerfield residents and their environment? To the mine workers? Not at all. They'd deserted their post long before that. They'd left it to the mining facilitator, DSDBI.

In fact, prior to the Department of Health and a consultancy firm, Golder Associates, instituting particulate monitoring in June of last year, no particulate monitoring had been conducted at the Costerfield mine since 13 February 2006. There still appears to be no particulate monitoring  of the Augusta mine's vent underway. 

(edit 4/9/15: this has now changed. Since the appearance of this blog and its raising of concerns, some monitoring is now occurring. But not enough and not in the right places all the time. And anyway, the horse has bolted.)

During early 2013, a new vent was constructed at the Augusta mine site to enable the company's expansion into a new and lucrative lode of minerals for extraction. Below is the information received by the ERC in May 2013 of the vent's tendering and construction since the previous meeting.

As inroads were made into the ore body underground dust spewed from the mine that vent, into the air, along the creek, around the district and beyond. 

Also announced in May was the Cuffley vent project:

By the time of the next ERC Meeting in August, the investigations were completed, the work plan was endorsed and a planning permit application was in the hands of City of Greater Bendigo Council.

Done and dusted...

The Cuffley vent was subsequently constructed to clear the underground mine of blasting compounds, dust and particulate antimony and arsenic and so ensure the safety of the mine workers by pumping the dust and particulates into the atmosphere from another direction. More dust was created and sent around the area by the mining company’s ore crusher. But the people above ground were wholly forgotten.

By the time the Department of Health arrived, months after being notified of the dust blanketing the area and months after its officers had declared that there was no dust coming from the crusher, nine homes were so badly contaminated that it was advised that children not be allowed to reside there. Residents were told to drink only bottled water.

Hundreds of tests for antimony and arsenic were conducted by local doctors. Hundreds of people – children among them – returned positive, elevated results.

(edit: These positive results have since been dismissed as being caused by contaminated sample bottles. But the simultaneous positive results for underground mine workers are understood to have been accepted as positive. Though the Departments have attributed these results to leaching from plastic water bottles. The same event and two different explanations... figure that one out...)

And the EPA was nowhere to be seen. Is still nowhere to be seen.

Three dust generating operations were permitted to proceed in an area that contains what the EPA itself terms a Class 3 Indicator – arsenic compounds. The linked document is a recognition of the danger posed by such substances from 2003! 

Maximum Effect Achievable (MEA) is the aim, not this:

According to the February 2008 volume of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, exposure to arsenic “produces various adverse effects, such as dermal lesions, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, liver disease, peripheral vascular disorders, arteriosclerosis, diabetes, neuropathy and cancer”. Cancers of the liver, kidney, bladder, lung and prostate. It's nasty stuff.

Arsenic, as a Class 3 Indicator, requires monitoring and MEA mitigation so that it doesn’t cause cancers in people and kill them. But the EPA has shirked its duties and precautionary responsibilities and allowed inadequate deposited dust monitoring to be conducted by the very department charged with facilitating mining, the Department of State Development, Business and Innovation, using these pieces of rubbish.

The monitoring and testing has and is being conducted – only just – according to standards that were inadequate for these purposes in 2003. 

(Can we see a photo of the dust gauges at Splitters Creek, please? That's the dust gauges that only measure dust on the Subject Land, because there aren't any anywhere else...)

When is the EPA going to fulfill its duties to the people of Costerfield – to the people of Victoria – by applying a thorough precautionary assessment of the conditions they face? By applying the Act.

When is Mr Finegan going to make an announcement that full particulate monitoring is to be conducted according to the stringent requirements of the existing EPA State Environment Protection Policies in order to safeguard the health and well-being of the environment and therefore the people of Costerfield and the surrounding areas? That a full application of all relevant EPA Policies is to take place?

Asbestos contamination of the Apollo Bay foreshore is a terrible thing to have happened. And no one should want to in any way undermine the importance of the threat that such contamination poses. Asbestos is frightening stuff.

But arsenic is a Class 3 Indicator requiring stricter control according to the EPA’s own policies. And to put the seriousness of the situation in Costerfield into perspective, it should be noted that while the United States’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Register (ATSDR) ranks asbestos at number 94 on its list of toxic substances, arsenic comes in at number 1.

And it’s not just arsenic that’s been getting blown – and is still being blown – about the Costerfield air. There is lead in the ore being mined and emitted – and lead is ranked at number 2 by the ATSDR; and mercury at number 3; and cadmium at number 7; chromium at number 17.

Why is there no EPA presence of any effective use in Costerfield? It appears as if the chief offences committed in Costerfield under the EPA Act 1970 have been committed by the EPA itself.

Perhaps our fellow Costerfield Update Community Member and EPA chief executive, Mr Finegan, could, in the interests of the health and well-being of rural Victorians and as a curative to the willful blindness that appears to have gripped the Authority, organise a car fitted with GPS and, on the next hot, windy day, could type in “Costerfield”. This would enable him to be directed straight to our town so that he can experience firsthand the issues we face with dust and toxic water. Type in “South Costerfield-Graytown Road” and he can witness the effects of EPA-approved spraying of heavy metal-contaminated water on native vegetation along a public road reserve.

By typing in “Hirds Pit”, Mr Finegan would be provided with instructions to take him to the hole at the top of the hill in Heathcote where EPA has provided Mandalay Resources with so-called “emergency” Pollution Abatement Notices that have resulted in up to 700ML (700,000 tonnes) of hazardous mine water and rainfall run-off (whatever that is!) from a disused tailings storage facility, being dumped, ahem, discharged. This is the place where EPA was satisfied by a risk assessment that employed another town's different geology as justification. Not a test pit or bore in sight. This is the stuff (note that it's not "potentially" hazardous):

Last thing on such a busy day, Mr Finegan could type in “Woodvale” where he would be able to observe a facility that has been taking waste mine water since the 1990s and that is to be so employed again, a facility that is still to be rehabilitated and that leaks. He should know about its various shortcomings already. He can have a chat with the residents who live around this site, who were assured it would all be dealt with by EPA and who will provide him with much information regarding the problems he will have managing the similar facility at Splitters Creek in Costerfield – a facility whose every requirement was rubber stamped by his North West staff.

Give the chief executive a car and a GPS. It’s the least the EPA could do.

And never let it be said that the EPA didn't do the least it could possibly do.